5 Ways to Improve Your IT Resilience and Disaster Recovery

For a business to prosper, the business owners should possess or hire someone with effective skills and techniques of IT resilience and disaster recovery. Many business and enterprises fail due to poor IT resilience and disaster recovery strategies.

IT Resilience

IT resilience refers to a system, business, network or an enterprise’s ability to withstand and overcome any challenges such as natural disasters. If an enterprise has a weak IT resilience system, its chances of failing whenever it is hit by any challenges or disaster are increased.  A business or system should be strong and resilient enough to withstand challenges such as cyber crime.

Disaster Recovery in IT

Disaster recovery refers to the set of procedures or strategies put in position to ensure a system bounces back to its regular performance once its hit by either human-induced or natural disasters. When people hear of disaster, they mostly think of hurricanes, earthquakes or floods.

However, a cyber-attack is also a disaster that can attack a system or an organization. Disasters come in different sizes and shapes. Preparedness to handle disasters will enable the business to quickly recover after the disaster hits it.

After a major challenge or disaster weak or infective IT resilience and disaster recovery system can result to:

• A disruption in the general activities of the system
• Crippling of the enterprise, system or the business activity
• Poor service provision to customers and stakeholders
• Overwhelming losses

Poor IT resilience and disaster recovery has cost companies $8,000 to $ 700,000 depending on the size of the company. These losses have been incurred in just a few hours of being down due to unpreparedness.

Some of the ways an organization can maintain the expected service provision through and after the a challenge or disaster are as discussed below.

The following tips will help you keep your business up and running despite technological setbacks that might come with IT related disasters.

Have a Disaster Recovery Plan on Stand-by

Use disaster recovery templates to enlist the plans you have for the enterprise in case a disaster or a challenge hits it.

When devising a disaster recovery plan, it is recommended to include;

• The overview and the aims of the plan
• Contact information of people whose help will be required in the recovery process
• Detailed information and description of what will be done immediately after the disaster hits the enterprise.
• A list of software, and systems and licenses that will be used to recover the system.
• Information on the insurance programs of the enterprise
• Outline the important IT assets that will be used in the recovery.

Having a detailed disaster recovery plan is necessary for disaster preparedness. It is also good to be familiar with the disaster recovery plan.

Have a Reliable Disaster Recovery and IT Resilience Team

Every enterprise should have a reliable team that would step in during and after a disaster hits the company. The team should be made aware of the IT resilience and disaster recovery plans. The team could include:

• The enterprise’ CEO
• Human resources personnel
• Head of each department
• Vendors who offer recovery services
• Software and backup personnel
• Emergency personnel
• Law enforcement personnel

The contacts to each of the team members should be readily available in case of an emergency.

Keep the IT Resilience and the Disaster Recovery Plans Update

After the disaster recovery plan is formulated, many organizations file them or keep them ‘safely’ in the drawers. It is usually not advisable to keep the plans and hope for no disaster to occur.

Immediately after the plan is formulated, every member of the team should be made aware of what their role will be in case an emergency occurs. Every member should ensure they are familiar with the roles they are expected to perform.

After the plan has been formulated, an update may be required. The updates may be added after an emergency, or after the team realizes something crucial could be missing out on the already formulated plan.

Use of reliable Data Replication technologies

Each organization should ensure that its important data and information is replicated to another site. It is usually safe to have a back-up system. A disaster can hit the system unexpectedly. In such a situation, very important data or information may be lost, an occurrence that might lead to crippling of the organization.

The replication process can occur over:

• A storage work network
• A local area network
• A wide area network

The process usually occurs between a primary storage site and a secondary offsite location.

There are several approaches on which replication may be done:

• A hypervisor
• In the host
• Storage array
• In the network

With these in place, your business will be better protected against IT-related disasters.

Use Reliable Cloud Computing and Storage

Cloud computing is one of the major ways of protecting information from any physical disaster such as floods or fires. The information is stored on an offshore site.  Cloud seeding is a strategy that is used to quickly recover and retrieve information.

Many organizations ignore the importance of investing in IT resilience and disaster recovery. Such organizations do not know how they much they may be risking. It is recommended that organizations employ the tips I have discussed above. These tips will ensure the organizations remain on their feet in case an emergency or a disaster hits them. It is unsafe to sit back and hope that a disaster does not hit your enterprise.

Conclusion